Gamer Memories: Nintendo Pilgrimage

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Mario didn't invite me over, but I showed up anyway.

By Daemon Hatfield

At IGN, we're a lot of things. Nerds, douches, Achievement whores, over-raters, under-raters, and so much more, but at our core, we are gamers. Each and every one of us has a brain filled with cherished memories that revolve around our hobby. Unwrapping a Nintendo Entertainment System on Christmas morning, beating Streets of Rage with a pal, desperately trying to get Lara Croft's nude code to work – you get the idea. Before all of us who lived the adventure drift into a senile state and forget, IGN thought it would assemble those stories in an ongoing feature called "Gamer Memories."

Here, an editor will walk you through one of his or her favorite memories involving a controller, some kind of dance pad, or (more generally) a memory that was a defining experience for the editor's time with games. On tap for this installment? Why, it's none other than Daemon Hatfield, IGN editor, host of Game Scoop, and T-shirt connoisseur.

I have been to both of Nintendo's headquarters, the one in Kyoto and the one in Seattle. Both visits were done as a layman before I worked here at IGN and both were adventures of sorts. I say "visited" but my time at each location may seem somewhat uneventful if you didn't grow up naming your cats after Zelda characters and touting a semi-finalist ranking at the Nintendo World Championships as one of your greatest accomplishments. What follows is the account of how I found myself standing outside Nintendo's Kyoto building in the summer of 2000.

My journey actually started many years earlier. Christmas 1985, to be exact. That was the year I received the original NES and began my love affair with Nintendo (although at times I've questioned Nintendo's commitment to the relationship). The NES had just been released in October, and I was the first kid on my block to own the gray Super Mario Bros. machine. I'd been playing Super Mario Bros. at my local Showbiz Pizza for months, and when I saw the commercials telling me I could play this amazing arcade game at home…well I f***ing lost it. I went insane. My parents were informed that there was only one thing I wanted for Christmas that year, and even though they faked me out and kept the gift hidden until all others had been unwrapped I was not disappointed.

I'd been playing a discarded Atari 2600 inherited from my uncle since I was probably four or five, but even back then, its games and graphics seemed quaint. The games in the arcades had shown me what was possible, and now I could get that arcade experience at home with my NES. Now I was playing with power.

Not only was I the first kid on my block to own one, I think I was the first kid in my school. All the nerds wanted to be at my place playing Mario Bros. or Duck Hunt (sorry, Gyromite). When the kids at school eventually got their own systems, they would call me in the evenings to ask where to find the Wave Beam in Metroid or how they could defeat Super Macho Man. Looking back, I should have set up my own NES help line and made a few bucks.

Seven-year-old Daemon loved his NES. And the Super Bowl, apparently.

Throughout three generations of gaming, from the NES to the SNES to the N64, Nintendo cemented itself in my mind as the master of the craft. Other developers made good and great games, but Nintendo made the best games. I had the SEGA Genesis and the TurboGrafx-16 and the PlayStation… But none of them offered an experience that was even close to Super Metroid, A Link to the Past or Banjo Kazooie. There was Nintendo, and then there was everything else.

So when I found myself in Kyoto in the summer of 2000, I felt I was too close to this entity that I so greatly admired not to try and seek it out. I was doing the study abroad thing in Japan, and while we were based in Tokyo, we took the Shinkansen bullet train to Kyoto one long weekend. I could only speak Japanese at a 4-year-old's level because my lessons had just begun that summer. (Sadly, my Japanese conversations are still best had with preschoolers and the very slow. I have not kept up my studies.) So getting around, asking for directions, and looking up addresses were all incredibly arduous tasks. Luckily, I had the help of a Japanese American who was in the study abroad program with me, spoke fluent Japanese, and also happened to be fond of games.